by Bob Spitz
The Kitchen Cabinet was also dead set against a third-party run. Holmes Tuttle had admonished Reagan: “You’re a Republican—and you’re going to stay one.”
Still, Bill Rusher attempted to convince him that a third-party run was in his best interests. “He’d come out and visit us every few months,” recalls Pete Hannaford, “begging Reagan to throw his hat in the ring as an independent.” The Republican Party was dead, Rusher insisted, decimated by Watergate and moderates. He even recruited Jesse Helms to exert a little pressure, along with hard-core conservatives on the Reagan staff led by Lyn Nofziger and Jeffrey Bell. “I thought the party was in such bad shape that we should consign the Republicans to the ash heap of history and start over, with Reagan,” says Bell, who was stationed in Washington with Nofziger and John Sears.
Sears put a stop to such talk. He knew third parties, historically, were doomed to failure, and they would never win an election “if voters saw Reagan as a Republican version of George Wallace.” His biggest ally was Nancy Reagan who, Sears said, “would never stand for it” and made herself perfectly clear on that point. Eventually, Sears had Reagan put it to Rusher unequivocally. “If I were to run for president,” he told him, “I intend to do it as a Republican.”
If I were to run. He refused to commit himself. The evasion grew tiresome to those such as Sears and Nofziger who were “unofficially” conducting a Reagan shadow campaign, and it scared off potential top-notch staff. “He’s running,” Mike Deaver insisted as early as 1973 to anyone who would listen, but no official statement came from the perennial non-candidate.
The only place this waffling registered as a facade was in the Oval Office, where Gerald Ford viewed Reagan as a serious threat. It was an unspoken fact that Ford was running. He hadn’t officially declared, but throughout the spring of 1975 his administration began to gain traction, with public opinion gently swinging his way. That old promise he’d made not to run was meaningless—it wouldn’t stick. He’d grown into the job, and it suited him. What’s more, the urge to win a full presidential term on his own was too tempting to ignore. As a formality, he notified the Federal Election Commission, authorizing supporters to raise money on his behalf. An incumbent deserved his party’s nomination. Illinois senator Charles Percy was making noise about a possible challenge, but Ford knew that if there was a challenge from within the party, it would come from Reagan.
Ronald Reagan posed a threat he took very seriously. Ford had tried buying him off in January with the bogus Cabinet post offer. Now, in late February, he dispatched Paul Haerle, Reagan’s former appointments secretary, to persuade his old boss to back off. And by March, Ford’s aides and colleagues, led by Pennsylvania senator Hugh Scott, began circulating a document on Capitol Hill that some were calling a “loyalty oath”—a pledge to support Gerald Ford and his vice-presidential running mate (no mention was made of Nelson Rockefeller) for the Republican nomination in 1976. Astonishingly, it worked. It was signed by 113 of 145 GOP congressmen and 31 of the party’s 38 senators in three days.
One rebel who refused to sign was Nevada senator Paul Laxalt. Reagan and Laxalt practiced mutual admiration that stretched back to their days as governors of adjoining states with common interests. They’d joined forces on half a dozen different compatible states issues—and, as things shaped up, they were joining again. Laxalt teamed up with the old Nofziger Group, now relocated to Los Angeles (and calling itself the Madison Group, or M Group, after Reagan’s hotel of choice in Washington) and devoting itself expressly to a Reagan for President movement. “John Sears proposed pitching Laxalt to head the exploratory committee,” recalls Charlie Black, a young aide from North Carolina whom Sears had recruited to assist him. At first, Laxalt expressed reluctance, but Sears turned up the heat. “Paul was a respected senator, good-looking, presentable—he had credibility,” Sears says. Above all, Sears didn’t want Jesse Helms dominating their spotlight. Helms, an early Reagan presidential advocate, was a conservative firebrand whose strident, often racially charged rhetoric placed him “to the right of Genghis Khan.” He was a rabid third-party crusader who opposed civil rights, feminism, gay rights, disability rights, affirmative action, abortion, and the National Endowment for the Arts. “That was too much damn baggage,” Sears says in retrospect. Laxalt, though every bit a conservative, was more pragmatic when it came to hot-button issues. He knew how to navigate the delicate ideological landscape without alienating the Republican base. Laxalt agreed to be the campaign’s front man, he said, if he had assurances that Reagan would actually run.
Sears guaranteed him that Reagan was in the race—and in it to win—but could not announce for financial reasons. Due to Federal Election Commission laws, a person could not ask anyone for so much as a nickel without declaring his candidacy within thirty days. If he did not formally declare, Reagan could continue profiting from his lucrative radio and newspaper venues without triggering the commission’s provision allocating equal media access to candidates for public office. There was no way he’d agree to abandon an enterprise that was bringing in a cool $800,000 that year. Still, Sears explained, they needed to launch a campaign committee to raise money right away in order not to fall behind Jerry Ford and his supporters. But—how to do that without violating the election laws?
Sears and a volunteer lawyer named Lawrence Smith studied the FEC laws, which they felt were murky, and came up with a dodge. They would announce the formation of a Citizens for Reagan committee, with a codicil—a convoluted letter from Ronald Reagan to Paul Laxalt affirming that he hadn’t yet made up his mind to seek the nomination and wasn’t endorsing the committee, but if he did eventually run, this committee would represent him. It was a dubious ploy. Sears admits the letter did not reflect the intention of those who wrote the election laws, but if it worked they were in business. In fact, the only pushback came from members of the press who demanded to know under what authority they acted. “We told them we had a legal opinion,” Sears recalls, “and they bought it. We didn’t tell them that it was Smith’s and my opinion, but what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.”
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Citizens for Reagan officially opened its doors on July 15, 1975. Paul Laxalt made the announcement at a press conference in Washington, at which he assured those in attendance that Ronald Reagan, at this time, was not running for office. “The purpose of this committee,” he said, “is to build an organization and raise the money necessary to conduct a viable and effective campaign once Governor Reagan decides to become an active candidate.” He was cautious not to attack Jerry Ford or any of his policies. “There was nothing that Ford was particularly vulnerable about,” says Sears, who wrote Laxalt’s speech. “He’s the commander in chief. If you criticized him you’re seen as being anti-American. But hidden in our strategy was the perception that Ford wasn’t up to the job.” To that end, he instructed Laxalt to say, “It’s not that we think President Ford is doing a bad job. It’s that we think Ronald Reagan can do a better job.”
In effect, they had thrown down the gauntlet. The announcement was a clear signal to the Ford camp that Ronald Reagan would challenge him for the Republican nomination in 1976. Both camps sensed a deepening fissure in the party between the moderate-liberal faction and the conservative-right wing. If that splintered their constituency, the election could very well slip to a Democrat.
On September 5, 1975, President Ford flew Air Force One to Sacramento, presumably to speak to the California legislature on the success of détente in the Middle East and the “truly alarming increase of violent crime throughout this country.” Keen political observers saw it as an incursion onto Reagan turf as a way of asserting his influence. Ford warmed up, delivering a breakfast address to the local Chamber of Commerce, then walked a few blocks to the capitol, shaking hands with a small crowd that had gathered to cheer his arrival. As the clock struck ten, a tiny woman in a red gown and turban—later identified as Lynette �
��Squeaky” Fromme, one of the Charles Manson “family” disciples—drew a .45 Army Colt from a leg holster and aimed it at President Ford. By a stroke of luck the gun failed to discharge. As Fromme was led away by a Secret Service agent, she shouted, “This country is a mess! The man is not your president!”
Almost as if in defiance of fate, Ford traveled to New Hampshire six days later on behalf of Louis Wyman, a Republican running for Congress, and worked the rope lines, shaking hands and kissing babies, going straight from Reagan’s stronghold to the scene of the first Republican presidential primary, five months away.
Ford drew encouragement from the crowds—and from the press that covered his barnstorming through the state. James Reston, reporting on the president’s reception for the New York Times, observed, “The notion that Ronald Reagan can get the presidential nomination is patently ridiculous unless you suspect the Republicans of suicidal tendencies.”
But Ford wasn’t the only aspirant to take heart from New Hampshire. Not to be outflanked, Reagan swooped into the state on the heels of Ford’s departure, also stumping for Louis Wyman. Aides described the scenes along the tour as “a lovefest” packed with crowds “who cheered themselves hoarse for Reagan,” attracting commentary that seemed to countermand the Times’ harsh appraisal. “The universal, high-octane contempt for all politicians somehow stops short of California’s former governor,” Mary McGrory wrote in the Washington Post. “He is perceived as a man of common sense who understands common people, especially New Hampshire retirees who turn purple as they talk of ‘all the money Congress voted itself before they sneaked off on vacation.’”
The trip to New Hampshire produced other favorable consequences for the Reagan team. While there, Sears and Jim Lake detoured through the provinces to get the lay of the land. One of their first stops included a visit with Meldrim Thomson, the state’s popular governor, who had been encouraging Ronald Reagan to run for president. “He was a hard-right-wing guy, regarded as a wacko, who people called Crazy Mel, but he was determined that Reagan should be president, so he was our wacko,” Lake says. Thomson offered them a primer on how to approach the state and supplied letters of introduction to other highly regarded Republican legislators. He also recommended that they talk to Hugh Gregg, the former governor and Rockefeller Republican, who seemed like an ideal candidate to serve as their state chairman.
Sears and Lake made a beeline to Nashua, where Gregg received them with suspicion. “He was a crusty guy, salt-of-the-earth, opinionated and outspoken,” Lake says, “but John and I both liked him.” Gregg was as prominent in New Hampshire as its “Live Free or Die” license plates. He came from a family of inherited wealth, with business and banking interests, and ran a prosperous furniture-manufacturing operation in Canada. Sears knew Gregg from the ’67 campaign with Nixon and also knew that the Ford campaign had courted him but made no concrete offer. Over a three-hour conversation and subsequent phone calls, Sears persuaded Gregg to accept the Reagan state chairmanship. “Once we got Gregg,” Sears says, “the press, who had been looking at us as a right-wing trip going nowhere, turned around and started trying to figure out what was wrong with Gerald Ford.”
The New Hampshire dominoes began to fall Reagan’s way. With Mel Thomson and Hugh Gregg aboard, Sears and Lake dropped in on William Loeb, the publisher of the Manchester Union Leader, the most influential newspaper in the state. “He was another very conservative, outspoken guy, an independent tough cuss,” says Lake, “who immediately decided to back Ronald Reagan.” Loeb was a key addition. He was a noted kingmaker with a powerful public apparatus who believed that Reagan conservatives, no matter how far they leaned to the right, had to come across as being entirely rational. He was also essential to John Sears’s strategy. Loeb was perhaps the one local individual with the ability to keep Governor Mel Thomson in check. “His heart is in the right place,” Sears told Loeb, “but he is a loose cannon who says and does stupid things.” Sears knew nobody could control Thomson. He was the guy who had threatened to send the National Guard into Maine over a minor fishing dispute, and many tagged him as “a racist.” Thomson had his heart set on being Reagan’s state chairman, and when he discovered Hugh Gregg got the nod instead Sears knew “he was bound to go apeshit.” As a precaution, he charged Loeb with keeping a lid on Thomson, and the publisher readily stepped up to the task.
All the right elements were falling into place, except for one. “I could not get Reagan to say he would run,” Sears recalls. “He wanted to, I was sure of that. But I got the impression he didn’t know how.” He continued to trot out the old adages, such as “the office seeks the man” and “if it’s the will of the people, it will be,” which frustrated Sears no end. The press continued to hound him about Reagan’s intention, to which he typically responded, “If it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck—it’s a duck.” Tom Reed had warned Sears he’d never get Reagan to agree to run. Even when Jerry Ford announced his candidacy on July 8, 1975, Reagan remained noncommittal. Eventually, Sears came to realize that deep down his candidate was inherently an actor accustomed to taking direction. It was “out of order” to ask him whether he was running or not, Sears decided. The actor needed a director to call the shots.
“Finally, I took him aside,” Sears recalls, “and said, ‘We’re going to announce in November.’ I handed him the draft of a speech and said, ‘Look it over, add to it, rehearse the hell out of it, because you’ll be using it to declare you are in the race.’ He didn’t say no, so we went ahead.”
Ronald Reagan was ready to hit his mark.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“MOMENTUM”
“It’s been said that if you put Ford and me together in a dark room you can’t tell us apart philosophically. Well, if you turn on the light, you can.”
—RONALD REAGAN
By November 20, 1975, when Ronald Reagan announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., the battle lines had been pretty well drawn. No other party member had stepped up to challenge the sitting president. It boiled down to Ford and Reagan, head-to-head, or as former Texas governor John Connally predicted: “a horse race.”
The favorite had not yet emerged. Both candidates presented pros and cons, but the outsider aspect carried an appreciable prejudice. Many in the party—many in Reagan’s inner circle, in fact—were not inclined to bless the undertaking. Henry Salvatori, one of the original Kitchen Cabinet financiers and a Ford confederate, considered it heretical to go against the GOP’s man in the White House. He was having none of it, and tried to sway others to decamp. The same was true of Leonard Firestone and David Packard, who, according to Ed Meese, “stomped out of a strategy meeting at the Reagans’ home,” never to return to the fold. (Packard later became finance chairman of the Ford campaign.) Other prominent politicians made their displeasure known. The night before Reagan’s announcement, Charles Percy expressed regret that “his candidacy would lead to a crushing defeat for the Republican Party in 1976.” But no one registered his disappointment as crisply as the recipient of a phone call Reagan made that same evening from his suite at the Madison Hotel.
As a matter of courtesy, he placed a call to the Oval Office to inform Gerald Ford of his imminent announcement. The president’s response was brief and brusque. “Well, Governor, I’m very disappointed,” he replied. “I’m sorry you’re getting into this. Regardless of your good intentions, your bid is bound to be divisive.” How can you challenge an incumbent president of your own party and not be divisive? Ford wondered. “It will take a lot of money, a lot of effort, and it will leave a lot of scars.”
Ford already had enough scars on his presidential résumé. His wife, Betty, an independent-minded First Lady, had veered off the reservation in an August 1975 TV interview with 60 Minutes by acknowledging her support for the Supreme Court’s legalization of abortion, condoning experimentation with marijuana, and suggesting tha
t premarital sex might go toward reducing the country’s divorce rate. Although some found her candor refreshing, attacks were swift and nonpartisan, with religious leaders across the spectrum feeding the outcry. Ford refused to criticize his wife’s views, and the damage was felt. Only weeks later, his administration plunged further into disarray when he replaced his secretary of defense, James Schlesinger, with Donald Rumsfeld and dismissed William Colby, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, in favor of George H. W. Bush. Soon afterward, Rogers Morton, the secretary of commerce, announced his imminent resignation. If a Cabinet shuffle didn’t signal internal chaos, on November 3, 1975, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller added his two cents by sending Ford a letter: “After much thought, I have decided further that I do not wish my name to enter into your consideration for the upcoming Republican Vice Presidential nominee.”
Rockefeller’s departure—perceived as a rift, but more like a banishment—offered a blessing in disguise. For months, he’d been regarded as a liability by Ford strategists, who sensed growing discontent with him from the conservative faction of the party. Had Rockefeller remained as a running mate, there was every indication their loyalties might shift to Ronald Reagan instead. Even the New York Times saw merit in Rockefeller’s withdrawal, noting that “his presence had become detrimental to Mr. Ford’s efforts to win the Republican Party nomination.” Aides suggested that holding an “open convention” to resolve the matter of a vice president would appease all sectors of the party. Still, it portrayed the Ford administration as coming apart at the seams.